Today’s Best in War Reporting comes from the legendary combat correspondent Ernie Pyle at the Italian front in WWII. With a simplicity of words and observations, Pyle manages to knock you over as he writes of the moments surrounding a young company commander’s death. In his words you can almost hear his own exhaustion as he holds back tears. It begins:
The narrative continues as Pyle evokes an almost bizarre scene as Capt. Waskow’s body is removed from the mule and placed with the other bodies of U.S. soldiers. The empathy with which Pyle treats this moment is a grim foreshadowing of his own future in the war. Like Capt. Waskow, Pyle was loved universally by the troops; and like Capt. Waskow, Pyle would not make it home from the war alive. He was killed the following April by sniper fire on one of the Japanese islands.
As Capt. Waskow’s men begin to pay their last respects, Pyle manages to convey how even their short remarks are far more emotional than they might seem on the surface.
But, of course, the soldiers (and Pyle) must get ready to continue fighting the next day.
Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:
“I sure am sorry, sir.”
Witnessing the moments he described Pyle showed that at a moment when his own emotions may have dominated his thoughts, his ability to step back, observe, and convey never left his writing.
